I Don't Believe in Soul Mates
by veryoldhabits
Summary: 50 mini-stories for the 1sentence challenge on LiveJournal. Covers everything from friendship to work to sex. I tried to organize it as chronologically as possible.


**1. Formal**  
His tuxedo is nice, obviously super expensive, with slick lapels and a suave sort of James Bond cut, and it might be some kind of high heel-induced stress hallucination, but the air of confidence he radiates at these fancy shindigs is kind of a turn-on.

**2. Talent**  
The doorbell rings at 6:30 on Christmas morning, waking her from a white wine coma, and when she pulls herself out of bed (swaddled in blankets like a goddamn burrito) to see what the hell is going on and opens her front door to discover an enormous, slender, cardboard box standing upright in the hallway; it takes her fifteen minutes to get it inside the door, twice as long to work it open, and holy shit, it's a painting, a painting of her, Jack's signature slashed jauntily in the lower-right corner in a neat beige.

**3. Hero**  
Two days after Jack's visit from Washington D.C., he sits down to compose a character reference to be included with any adoption paperwork she might file in the future; it is decidedly easy to write, the end-result saturated with positive statements about her creative talent, mental acuity, and moral compass – he sends a hard copy to her office via overnight delivery, and when he checks his voicemail the next afternoon, he is delighted by the tone of gratitude in her voice: "Oh my god, Jack, I don't know what… _thank you_."

**4. Eclipse**  
When they go out together, or she attends some kind of elaborate soirée as his strictly platonic date, there is often an element of competition – which of them is the most bored or embarrassed or piquant or drunk? – that helps to relieve her of the pressures of their friendship; she is not a model, he reminds her, and is passable company because he believes he can turn her into something better than she is.

**5. Wings**  
At the end of the day, Jack knows he has no limitations; he is capable of anything and everything as long as he engages an appropriate amount of willpower, but Lemon has no knowledge of the greatness of which she is capable and he wants, more than anything, for her to discover herself – to fly.

**6. Unknown**  
It's hard to tell what his motivation is for doing all this, for pushing her towards leadership and success; she can't tell if he's playing a trick or if he really has that much faith in her.

**7. Dance**  
She looks like a buffoon, a raving lunatic constructed entirely of strangle angles, a rhythmic peculiarity whose only redeeming aesthetic qualities are a bright smile and relatively functional eyes which, under the right circumstances, may or may not be quite lovely (he is still in the first phase of assessment); she does, indeed, dance as if no one is watching.

**8. Box**  
It's easiest for Liz to explain the importance of Jack's opinion with a noncommittal shrug; "He's my boss," seems inadequate, and "he's my friend," doesn't always make sense.

**9. Memory**  
One day over coffee he idly confesses that his first impression of her was "clever, if self-destructive;" she pulls a cartoonish face – eyebrows and lips wildly contorted to illustrate her disapproval – and snaps back, "Well, I thought you were gay," which makes both of them laugh because who is she kidding?

**10. Gravity**  
Their disagreements are like warzones, structured yet unpredictable, with each party certain they stand on moral high ground, and though there are times her frustration with him feels like an unending gypsy curse, it is, on occasion, somewhat arousing.

**11. Forgotten**  
The story begins with Jack and Don Geiss co-captaining a sailboat called _Achilles_ and ends with one of their unfortunate guests getting tossed overboard for daring to eat beluga caviar from a silver spoon, and although Liz would probably rate the subject matter of this tale a solid 3 on the Hilarity Scale, there's something about his narrative – his wit and inventive specificity – that's genuinely entertaining; he is, she reminds herself, pretty damn funny.

**12. Cold**  
Though his eyes are a sharp, frosty blue, clear and cold and clinical, there is something about the weight of his gaze that causes warmth to build at the edges of her skin – which is, you know, kind of weird.

**13. Midnight**  
She heads up to his office that night to ask if he wants to share a car home, but from the moment she slips through the door it's clear that something's up – the air is heavy and cool, and she instinctively pulls her hoodie tight across her stomach as she approaches the solitary figure at the window; "Jack," Liz begins, but before she can continue he turns to face her, the corners of his mouth slanted downward into that rare, pouty frown: "I know it's late, Lemon," he says, "but if you help me finish this scotch, we can order a pizza."

**14. Laugh**  
On those occasions when he stops by a TGS rehearsal, he does not laugh at the material nearly as often as he laughs at how much she enjoys her own jokes.

**15. Fall**  
Two weeks before she's due to return to work full-time, she receives an abrupt, if telling, text message that, despite the fact that they haven't been in contact since the show wrapped in April, makes her smile: "In Florida; Colleen says hello."

**16. Promise**  
"You will always give me your honest opinion about these things, won't you, Lemon?"

**17. Cover**  
When, after ten or eleven rounds of Kill, Boff, Marry, Frank points out that she always decides to boff Jack, she explains, "God, Frank, I couldn't marry a Republican!"

**18. Lock**  
"What I'm trying to say is don't worry so much," she sighs, brushing hair out of her face as she struggles to keep pace beside him, "corporate loves you, Jack; you're a shoo-in for any sort of promotion or advancement your money-addled brain could ever dream of."

**19. Ring**  
"Lemon, I was hoping you could regale me with a series of embarrassing stories from your youth," he says, and though it's four in the morning, though she isn't exactly in the mood for this kind of crap, there is a pained sort of melancholy in his voice that gives her pause; she wedges her cell phone between her pillow and her sleep-numb cheek and sighs: "Okay – sexual or social?"

**20. Strength**  
She strolls through the bookstore with no sense of direction or purpose, hands shoved deep into her pockets as she glances at the labels tidily displayed at the end of each splintering shelf; after wandering casually through Drama and Cooking, she finds herself in Business and, charged with a shock of curiosity, begins scanning the hard- and paperbacks until she finds the title she's looking for: carefully prying it from its place between books by two other Donaghys, Liz smiles at the dashing, if unambiguously posed, photo of Jack on the front cover.

**21. Silk**  
Everything about him is smooth, natural – finely tuned, but organic – and it's frustrating because while he's hanging up in a corner office like some intricate, frosty spider's web, she's just tufts of raw cotton: tangled, only useful after processing, and easily blown away.

**22. Forever**  
It's easy to assume that some things exist eternally – life, time, and heartache each carry the colossal threat of permanence – but love, Jack knows, is as fleeting as childhood or the tail of a shooting star.

**23. Highway**  
She rolls her eyes back into her head and sighs, using her knuckles to press her cheeks forward and away from her skull – a sense of profound dread fills her chest like a spooky kind of heartburn; "You can still take a dare, Lemon," he smiles, eyes gleaming mischievously, like those twinkly lights you string on Christmas trees; she can't remember why she thought this game would be fun, but plays anyway: "Eugh, okay – it was 1995, in a powder-blue AMC Gremlin that we parked off the Eisenhower in Chicago, and he had a mole on his junk the size of a quarter."

**24. Silence**  
In college, a rickety old professor taught her "the basis of acting is the reality of doing," that people betray thousands of their own secrets through mundane action and insignificant gesture; it seemed like bullshit at the time, but now, as she watches Jack sign Hank Hooper's pale green birthday card, she realizes the truth in the idea: his childhood's in the angle of his pen, his heart is in his name.

**25. Dream**  
"I had this idea once," she breathes, "that if I worked hard enough, I'd get everything I wanted – a husband and a kid, lots of friends, a shelf full of Emmys…" she trails off, tiny hands tearing into a fresh bag of Cheetos, and his heart breaks for her a little.

**26. Overwhelmed**  
Watching her with Liddy is disorienting, surreal; she's not his wife, nor the girl's mother, yet there is an indecipherable lightness in Lemon's typically inelegant body as she cradles his child, happily chatting at her as though they are old friends.

**27. Drink**  
"Come on," she begs him, "it's Saturday night, the show's just wrapped, neither of us have anything to do—and besides, I've always wanted to know what it was like to get wasted with an Irish dude!"

**28. Hope**  
"Holy shit, kick-ass idea," she slurs, slamming her newly emptied shot glass down on the uneven surface of the bar, "we should definitely set all of our exes up – think about it: Dennis and Nancy, Wesley and Phoebe, Carol and Elisa –" when he playfully throws a handful of beer nuts at her and asks if that means the two of them will end up together, she snorts, "In your dreams, Donaghy!"

**29. Whisper**  
"Trust me, Elizabeth," he murmurs, his mouth close enough that she can smell the rich combination of liquor and chocolate on his breath, "if I wanted to seduce you, I would be completely successful, and you would be completely… satisfied."

**30. Mask**  
For some totally crackass reason, everything about this moment – his fingers skimming the skin of her wrist, the tense surface of his alpha-male aura, the ten inches of negative space separating their junk – is seriously messing with her ladybusiness, but instead of bellowing "MY HORMONES!" like a coked-out tranny, she smiles, shoots the last half of her beer, and says, "Sure thing, Jack Attack," while trying like hell not to picture him naked.

**31. Temptation**  
She isn't sure how they got from the bar to her apartment, how they managed to call a cab or operate an elevator, but here they are on her sofa: brains muddled, laughing their asses off at an old Buster Keaton film on TMC – and then, suddenly, he is radiating heat like a well-dressed furnace, and she turns to him in time to catch a brief glint of hunger in his eyes, and she knows what's coming because this is a scene from a Lifetime movie she wrote in college, and when he leans into her (whispering, "Lemon, I'm going to kiss you," like it's a plain and simple fact) she prays to Oprah that this isn't a bad choice.

**32. Fire**  
Jack Donaghy is typically quite precise in his romantic endeavors, but this kiss is fueled by alcohol and nagging curiosity, two violent accelerants; as he breathes her tongue into his mouth, a rush of hunger and need whips through them like fresh air, and when she gasps softly against him they both go up in flames.

**33. Wait**  
The first time he brings her to climax, her eyes widen, their sharklike intensity increasing with her breath and her pulse; arms wrapped tightly around his neck, she chokes out a panicked "Oh my god, what is happening to me!?" and he realizes that this might be the only time a man has paid attention to her needs.

**34. Body**  
She looks just as he expected she would, which pleases him – he prefers to invest in stock with guaranteed returns.

**35. Music**  
They fall asleep together, half-naked but completely pleased, and though there's no spooning, no picturesque physical contact, their individual melodies have come together, harmonizing, and they belong exactly where they are.

**36. Breathe**  
Nine Jägerbombs, four martinis, and one questionable sexual encounter later, Jack wakes up half blind, muscles shriveled from dehydration; he groans, a low, gruff rumble, slowly lifting his head from the rough surface of what appears to be a very cheap rug; he is, for the most part, naked (but then again, he notes hazily, so is Lemon, who is sprawled out on the sofa above him like a test dummy flung from a horrifying car accident), and - _oh, dear lord_.

**37. Lies**  
_That was an accident_, she tells herself, face sticky with sweat and imported beer, _and_ _it was a joke – and it was so so so stupid, and it will never ever happen again, ever._

**38. Fever**  
When she pokes her head into his office that evening, she doesn't think he'll offer her a drink – or, if he does, she believes that she'll be able to turn him down – but he's got pinot grigio and a platter of cheese, and before she knows it she's filled to the brim with that charming brand of alcoholic heat and this time she kisses him first.

**39. Run**  
What surprises her most is that he doesn't always want a home run – usually he's satisfied with second or third base, and when they do bump uglies, he's totally awesome about letting her keep her shoes on.

**40. Sacred**  
He notices that their encounters are somewhat ritualistic in nature – private and procedural, full of ambiguous symbolism each can interpret any way they please – and alcohol, like the Eucharist, seems to establish an agreement between them: _I accept your body and your soul__**.**_

**41. Journey**  
In hindsight, neither of them can honestly justify anything.

**42. Red**  
In the days following the divorce, he gathers every red object he owns (whether personal or professional in nature, he doesn't discriminate) and burns them all – it is, after all, Avery's power color, and there's no room for sentimentality in the steel trap that is his brain.

**43. Hurricane**  
When they discover, through Brian Williams, that Sandy poses a much bigger threat to the east coast than anyone anticipated, he calls and graciously invites her to stay in his penthouse until the storm has passed; she takes offense at the offer: "I know you think my apartment is a piece of crap…" but before she can decline, the second floor begins to bow above her head and suddenly there's water; "…aaaand it looks like you're right."

**44. Ice**  
She decides that Jack already knows Criss will be joining them.

**45. View**  
Although his professional code of ethics does not condone breaking the rules in such a brazen manner, Jack has always believed in outperforming the competition; if he happens to be a better lover than Criss and Lemon leaves him, the whole affair becomes a simple matter of customer satisfaction.

**46. Search**  
She doesn't bother to tell him that he can't unfasten her bra because she isn't wearing one; there's something about his hands skating frantically across her back that fills her with a golden, sunny sort of contentment.

**47. Talk**  
She tries to tell him that this won't work, that he can't Pokemon her because she's been caught by someone else, and though he smiles and agrees with her in the moment, she knows it isn't really over.

**48. Farewells**  
The first time they knock boots without booze, she can't keep her mouth shut – "So now the mentor/mentee relationship covers, uh, naked stuff? Or is this some kind of weird, I don't know, sendoff thing? God, you're leaving GE, aren't you? Oh my god…" – she tries to tell him goodbye as he unbuttons her blouse, that she'll miss, but his head snaps up before she can get very far and he glares at her with an expression of crazed ferocity she's seen a hundred times in contract negotiations and business meetings: "Lemon," he growls, "I'm not going anywhere; my desire to bed you is not conditional so please, for the love of god, shut up."

**49. Candle**  
Before she lets him near her bedroom, she redecorates a little: throw pillows, air fresheners, warm stuff – little touches of femininity to convince him that he hasn't made some terrible mistake.

**50. World**  
"Sometimes I think that we're so involved in each other's lives that if one of us died, the other one would just kinda disappear."


End file.
